FACULTY SENATE MEETING
March 2, 2016
1. Call to Order.
CHAIR AUGIE GRANT (Journalism) called the meeting to order.
2. Corrections to and Approval of Minutes.
CHAIR GRANT asked for corrections to the minutes of the meeting of February 2, 2016.
There were none, and the minutes were approved.
3. Invited Guests
CHAIR GRANT introduced guest speaker Tommy Coggins, from the Office of
Sponsored Award Management and Research Compliance.
GUEST TOMMY COGGINS (OFFICE OF SPONSORED AWARDS MANAGEMENT
& RESEARCH COMPLIANCE) stated that his office’s primary responsibility is dealing with Federal Regulations and policies related to financial interests, disclosing financial interests and dealing with those in terms of research compliance.
Faculty who have submitted proposals through the SPMRC process have filled out the same financial disclosure which each proposal, a burden that the office is trying to correct in a way to stay in compliance with Federal regulations.
So these are the two basic policies. ACAF 1.50, Outside Professional Activities, has a requirement for annual reports. Each faculty member is required on an annual basis to report their outside professional activities. It’s a paper process that goes from the faculty members through the department chairs to their Deans and to the Provost.
The system was developed jointly by the Office of Research and the Office of the Provost to combine these into one system that collects this information one time and feeds it into both the Outside Professional Activities report and the proposals submission. It started on
March 1; over the next month, faculty members will be asked to do this annual report and it’s going to cover what SPMRC needs to review financial interest-related sponsor projects as well as cover the information that’s needed to comply with the outside professional activities. The name is Activity and Interest Reporting (AIR). The site is maintained on the Provost’s website, with a six-minute video that shows step-by-step how to get through the process. These will come as they are completed by the faculty members, they’ll go to the Department Chair’s inbox and there’s an opportunity to approve it, ask questions, send it back to the faculty member. Then ACAF 1.50 says the
Department Chair should address any appearances of conflict of interest or impropriety and if there are deemed to be any of those, to come up with a management plan.
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Log in using regular USC credentials, the same used for Outlook or Blackboard. On an annual basis, faculty will start a disclosure, complete it and answer four questions. If the answer to all four is “no,” they’re done.
If the answer is “yes” to any of those, the faculty member will go to Part 2 that will give an opportunity to pick the entity for which they worked, or for whom they have a financial interests. And then they’ll get specific questions about the relationship with that outside entity. How much time they spent. What’s the nature of the relationship, intellectual property? Those types of things. Then they confirm the disclosure’s complete, submit it, and it goes to the Department Chair.
CHAIR GRANT asked if faculty be proactive in going to the site and filling it out or should they wait until the Department Chair informs them it’s time to do the form?
GUEST COGGINS suggested they should be proactive.
CHAIR GRANT introduced the second guest speaker, Pam Bowers, the Associate Vice
President of Student Affairs, to explain “Beyond the Classroom Matters.”
GUEST PAM BOWERS (ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT – STUDENT AFFAIRS
AND ACADEMIC SUPPORT) stated that “Beyond the Classroom Matters” is a project to create a more comprehensive student record of every student’s educational experience, so administrators can figure out more systematically how students’ involvement in support and enrichment programs matters for their success, and use that information for improving the undergraduate experience. The project is nearing completion. This is a collaborative effort among the Division of Student Affairs and Academic Support, the
Provost Office, the Division of Information Technology and the Registrar’s Office.
BOWERS stated that many of Carolina undergraduates thrive in college, perform well academically with relative ease, and seek out enrichment experiences, enrichment opportunities. They don’t want to miss out on anything so they look for leadership roles and involvement in community service projects, undergraduate research, study abroad, internships; activities that are above and beyond what’s required for graduation in a degree program.
On the other hand, some students here are more challenged by the undergraduate experience, and actually all students, even those who generally thrive, need help with something at some point. A lot of students do need assistance with choosing a major that’s a good fit and planning for how to launch a career. Some will need help with study skills, time management, maybe even tutoring in a course or two and some will need emotional support when they have a troubled relationship of some kind. Most students will need some kind of help resolving some kind of problem during their college experience because they are in this developmental stage of figuring out who they are and how to move through the world.
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Carolina and other universities provide lots of resources, lots of programs for support and enrichment for undergraduate students because they believe that it matters for their success and because they believe it adds educational value. But because these enrichment and support programs are not required for graduation and students don’t earn credit or grades for their participation, institutional data systems have not systematically included records of these kinds. So the project “Beyond the Classroom Matters” (BTCM) is based on the idea that these educational experiences should also be documented in students’ educational records to provide information for continuous improvement and for demonstrating the return on investment they generate.
Here’s a very simple representation of the components of this project (slide image). Each of these support and enrichment programs has been defined in an on-line catalogue; when a student participates in one of these programs, the providing department creates a record of that experience for the student and then these records are collected in a central repository and interfaced with student academic records in Banner through the data warehouse. That provides a more comprehensive record of the student’s whole educational experience.
They are currently in the process of testing and refining this system and expect and hope to begin full implementation of collecting these records in Fall 2016.
Alexander Astin’s assessment model says that improving the results or outcomes that you’re trying to achieve, which they are trying to do in Student Affairs, requires that you look at the whole system that’s producing the current results. Consideration must be given to all these things, the inputs, the environment, and the results. The point of this is that students come to the University of South Carolina with variable characteristics. They vary in academic ability. They vary in demographic characteristics and also in their developmental maturity and wellbeing that they bring to the campus. The rectangle in the center of the slide represents the degree program. So these are the courses, the content of courses, the progression of courses, the curriculum to help students achieve the learning goals set for them in the respective degree programs and then the Carolina core. The rectangle represents the main event for an undergraduate – a degree.
The garnet colored circle surrounding that represents the learning environment that
Carolina provides to support and enrich each student’s academic experience. This is what is being documented in the “Beyond the Classroom Matters” project. And this represents the unique role of Student Affairs in Undergraduate education.
Student Affairs and Academic Support focuses more on those institutional outcomes of retention, graduation, employability and the work that they do to help students is focused more on developmental kinds of learning. They intend to help students succeed by helping them make successful transitions into college, through college and out of college into jobs or graduate programs by persisting and making appropriate progress towards a degree each semester and by developing citizenship and leadership knowledge and skills, and soft skills for employability.
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Each year, Student Affairs assists with the transition into college for about 7,000 new freshmen and transfer students, by engaging them in orientation sessions, Welcome Week activities, programs in the residence hall, information fairs, and a lot of different ways to help make students feel welcome, help them develop that sense of belonging, understand the expectations in this new environment, and help them find the resources that they need to be successful.
Since Student Affairs deals with such large numbers, they need to be structured and intentional in how they set up these programs and keep good records about who participates and in what so they can better determine what works and for which students and then use that information to modify their practices and achieve better results the next time around.
An example of a catalogued activity is the University Ambassadors program. These are the students who provide information about USC to prospective students and their families, and give tours of the campus. So they are actually providing a very valuable service to the university while having a great learning experience themselves. The BTCM catalog entry describes how students engage when they serve as a university ambassador
- what they do, how much time they spend, how they get feedback on their performance and how they are engaged in reflecting on their learning from being involved in this experience. And across of the top of this slide this image also demonstrates one of the ways that the data will be useful. These catalogue descriptions makes the educational purpose of these programs visible, which helps illustrate the learning possibilities in this rich environment provided for undergrads at Carolina.
This (slide image) is a draft of one of several ways that a student will be able to view their own records. This will provide an opportunity for them to think about what they are learning from these experiences outside of the classroom and to perhaps more intentionally choose how they might become involve or involve themselves outside the classroom in order to develop knowledge and skills that they are going to need in the career field they have chosen.
Student Affairs representatives spoke to a group of employers who hire Carolina graduates and they said that that they felt like the most valuable aspect of this project might be that it will help students articulate what they’re learning in these activities and identify and be able to talk about skills they are gaining that are transferable to the work place. Students often recognize that they have a deep learning experience when they serve in a leadership role or study abroad or do one of these extra things, but they often have a hard time putting that learning into words and being able to say more specifically what they gained from that activity.
Employers also said that they would find it useful to have an official document verifying these university experiences. So each student will be able to produce a document reporting their activities to supplement their academic transcript and provide a more complete representation of what they know and can do as a result of their Carolina experience.
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These data will also help administrators show how many and which students are engaging in these various programs and services so they’ll be able to more easily see to what extent they are reaching target populations with various programs and to see the extent to which all students are engaged in purposeful activities outside the classroom.
They’ll be able to break these data out in lots of different ways, for example, how students in a degree programs are engaged in support and enrichment programs. The data will be structured in a way that can be used for more systematic analysis of students’ success so they will have these variables about how students are involved outside the classroom to figure out how it works and for which students to help them achieve their goals.
“Beyond the Classroom Matters” adds another dimension to the many efforts already focused on helping every student having a superior undergraduate experience.
As they’ve worked through this project, they have discovered that while transparency sounds good in theory, it can actually be a little intimidating. The program providers have reported that they have a few uncomfortable conversations because this process requires them to be very clear on what the educational intentions are for their programs and the delivery methods that they are using to achieve those purposes. All of those hard conversations, necessary to clearly articulate the educational purpose and method of each program inthe catalogue,have improved programs and helped program providers better understand how programs fit together to achieve the institutional goals for undergraduate education.
Carolina has received some national attention for the project and some financial support from the Lumina Foundation. The BTCM project was selected for the Lumina
Foundation’s Comprehensive Student Record project, led by the professional associations
American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) and
NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education.
The rich learning environment beyond the classroom provided by the University of South
Carolina is an important selling point for students and families that choose Carolina. This project will help Carolina improve and better tell the story about the return on investment in providing such a complete and superior undergraduate student experience.
CHAIR GRANT asked if there is any workload for faculty in submitting extra things in other than grades.
GUEST BOWERS stated there was not.
CHAIR GRANT asked if faculty would have access to these students’ records.
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GUEST BOWERS responded that they are planning to make that information visible so faculty can see how their students are involved. But this is all about documenting Student
Affairs’ work and what they contribute to undergraduate education.
PROFESSOR ERIN ROBERTS (RELIGIOUS STUDIES) expressed her discomfort about reporting student support with relation to what she read there - spiritual, emotional and academic information. Does this violate ADA and how is this different from the
Mount St. Mary’s Survey?
GUEST BOWERS replied that when they say reporting, they are going to make information visible to students about their own involvement, and they are working through all the considerations on privacy, and students’ control of their own data. None of this is accessible to anyone yet, so many decisions have to be made but they will follow the guidelines on HIPPA and FERPA and those sort of things. They are thinking that permission for access to students’ information should follow along the same lines as access to academic information; for example, if an advisor has access to a student’s records, they would be able to see this too. But they recognize that there are some differences in the kinds of things that they are talking about.
PROFFESSOR ROBERTS stated that she would be uncomfortable reporting that her student had seen a counselor or that they needed spiritual help. That seems to kind of violate their privacy.
GUEST BOWERS replied that they are taking those concerns very seriously and having had lots of conversations about that and they will have more. The word spiritual, used to represent one of the developmental realms, may be a little misleading because it is really about being able to consider the perspective of others and taking a broader view. It’s not about a student’s specific religion or religious practices.
PROFESSOR ROBERTS replied that she was more concerned about the psychological and the academic.
GUEST BOWERS stated that the same rules that protect students’ health information now would be in effect here.
BREAK IN SEQUENCE: President Pastides presented his Report during this time. His
Report can be found under “Reports of the Officers”.
CHAIR GRANT introduced the third speaker, Derrick Huggins, Vice President of
Facilities and Transportation.
VICE PRESIDENT DERRICK HUGGINS (FACILITIES AND TRANSPORTATION) introduced two of his colleagues, Peter Flotz from LMG and Wilson Jones from
Brailsford nd Dunlavey, consultants to help Carolina move forward with the parking strategy. One thing that really stood out from Huggins’ last meeting with Faculty Senate was the discussion over some challenges with paying for parking. Faculty Senate and the
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Faculty Welfare Committee made it clear to Huggins that whatever plan he comes up with be fair to the individuals that don’t make as much money as some are blessed to make. The plan that they have put together is very cognizant of that.
The plan is not set in stone and will be vetted by the Faculty Welfare Committee.
Huggins asked Peter Flotz to talk about the dynamics of parking in Columbia and why it is very important at this time for us to start talking about the charge for parking especially for surface lots. They do charge for garages and for certain spaces in the core, but most of parking spaces are free. The lots are experiencing deterioration and something needs to be done very aggressively to ensure the campus is as safe as it should be.
GUEST PETER FLOTZ (LMG) has been a consultant to the university for about a decade and to the City of Columbia for almost two decades. So he is relatively familiar with the parking characteristics of the area.
People may wonder why this sort of this increase is being discussed now when media coverage about Uber and millennials not buying cars makes it sound like there should be
3 cars in the parking lot and everybody else walked or got a ride. The real world is that while students are buying 30% less cars than previous generations and will Uber something, others have not changed their habits. Parking doesn’t received funds from anywhere else. It just pays for its own way. There are parking lots in the university that have not been repaved in 40 or 45 years. Flotz’s team graded all the parking lots and out of 62 surface parking lots, 40 of them were poor.
They are trying to do two things: One is to figure out a way to fund some kind of maintenance plan for these lots so that they can be safe. They can be paved. They can offer some kind of sustainable features. They could be lit and secure, that’s always a huge issue. And then the other thing is to start making sure that faculty and student parking is a bit more segregated and in fact that faculty parking is in its own lots, starts to have its own areas so that employees are guaranteed a spot.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS stated that there is a phenomenon on campus now, where all this close proximity private housing, they’re building garages associated with those buildings. And what administrators are starting to see is more students parking in those areas and not parking on campus, so there is an opportunity now to carve out sections of core area parking and base it on faculty and staff only and not be competitive with students. Everybody cannot park in the core but with these dollars the frequency of shuttles will increase, whether they may be internal or external shuttles, the external shuttle being the COMET. It is very well funded now that the Regional Transit Authority has designed routes that are close in local neighborhoods to bring individuals into campus for a very small fee. That transportation upgrade is something that Columbia is ready for.
Huggins is very interested in engaging the Faculty Welfare Committee just to start the process based on the due diligence of the last 9 months and to look at this for maybe the next 30 days, be very aggressive about this, then come back to the body of the Faculty
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Senate and present in tandem with the Faculty Welfare Committee to show how they are vetting these opportunities to improve not only parking but transit in the core.
GUEST FLOTZ added that they have to understand from faculty what’s good about what they have and what’s bad about what they have and what they need to improve and that way it becomes at that point a simple math exercise when they start talking about what these things cost and how they can pay for them.
PROFESSOR MICHY KELLY (MEDICINE) asked if the new plan for parking will have any space carved out for faculty visiting from other campuses because that’s one of the biggest complaints among the faculty at the School of Medicine. They want to develop these cross campus collaborations, but parking really makes it prohibitive even to come here to Faculty Senate.
GUEST FLOTZ replied that would be easy to accommodate with special permits, by segregating certain lots near the Medical Campus.
PROFESSOR KELLY responded, that they need parking on the Columbia campus; parking at the School of Medicine is plentiful and free. The trouble is when trying to come to anything on main campus and there’s all of this effort from administration to promote collaboration but it’s really difficult when faculty have to carve an hour out of their day just to have time to drive over here and spend ½ hour to find parking.
GUEST FLOTZ stated these are the kinds of things that are really important for them to hear, this daily experience of what’s it’s like to park here. One of the things Derrick and he have talked about over the years quite a bit is that that experience can be a very large part of the competitive advantage or disadvantage that faculty see at peer schools.
They do a lot of work with resort communities down in Florida and one of the things they try to tell people is that parking is the first thing somebody does when they come to a town and it’s the last thing somebody does when they come to a town. It’s the same way here at the school, so if Parking is making employees miserable because they have to leave 1 hour before a meeting, they need to figure out a way to make that better and they need to hear all of those problems so that they don’t design a system that’s just as wrong as today.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS stated that Professor Kelly was talking about are “swing spaces” and there will be “swing spaces” available with decals that will get faculty into the Strom Thurmond Wellness Center and Blatt P.E. Center, or wherever, just to allow them to park close to the area and accommodate them while they’re here for a short, limited amount of time.
CHAIR GRANT asked what the cost would be.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that they looked at what the Faculty Welfare
Committee and the Faculty Senate asked them to do and not to price something that
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would cause a drain on individuals who are on the lower pay wage, so they have it down to $10.00 - $20.00 per month. That is pre-tax so it will probably be around $16.00 -
$18.00 dollar amount that will be reduced from a paycheck but that’s not in stone yet.
That’s just being transparent and making sure that they come with a plan in the next 30 days that Faculty Welfare can vet.
PROFFESSOR CARRIE QUEENAN (MANAGEMENT SCIENCE) asked for clarification that employees that are in parking garages will not see a change, but there will be no free parking lots, so no “Z” lots any more.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that there will be “Z” lots but they will not be free. Right now this is not associated with garages. They do sometimes go up on the garages to ensure the structural integrity of those garages but that is not part of this plan.
PROFESSOR NATHANIEL BELL (NURSING) stated that he walks to campus everyday but on the weekends he often drives to campus if he needs to pick something up. He asked if it be possible to continue on the weekends that “Z” lots be free with no cost versus during the week charging the nominal fee of $10.00.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that for people coming in on the weekends there will be designated areas to park and those areas on the weekends are usually free, if there isn’t an event going on.
PROFESSOR BELL replied that he would look at the map for something close to his building.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS stated he would provide him with that information.
PROFESSOR LORI ZIOLKOWSKI (EARTH AND OCEANS SCIENCES) asked if they were looking into incentivizing not driving. In California there was a lot of incentivization by the state to reward people who hadn’t driven and so similar to a question like that someone who doesn’t draw on the resource to drive they would be able to be incentivized by having parking available on weekends or what not. So has there been any sort of thought given to incentivizing those who do not drive and have a load on the system?
GUEST FLOTZ replied that it’s a very complicated answer, but starts with no, they haven’t thought about that at all, but it’s a great idea. The question is again, it’s a closed loop, so the budget is the budget and if they incentivize some people that means that other people are paying for that incentive. If that’s the wishes as they go forward, then they can come up with a plan to do that.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS stated that one of the things they’ve done is work with the COMET to provide transportation for the freshmen class for free. And there are talks about a universal pass for all faculty and staff and students to ride the COMET and design routes that are directly into University of South Carolina as part of the
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transportation management plan. It would give options for individuals at a lesser charge to get to campus.
PROFESSOR STACY FRITIZ (PUBLIC HEALTH) asked if they have discussed any differences between undergraduate and graduate students. Graduate students come and go from campus throughout the day especially if they are doing community-based research.
This could also be true for faculty members but she knows that’s a concern in the graduate school community.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that need would be noted. One of the things about the campus is it’s divided up into quadrants and in each quadrant there are garages and certain garages have hourly parking. They can look at certain set asides for that use for graduate students. They have noted that on their ListServe and that is part of the plan to give those options on where employees and students park during the day to do their research or visit campus.
CHAIR GRANT asked for the anticipated date that paid parking will go into effect.
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that they are being very aggressive about it and would like to see something in place by August 15, 2016. But at the same time, they do have to vet this program, not only with the Faculty Welfare Committee but also the CFO
NCO of university to ensure that they are doing the right thing for protecting parking assets.
PROFESSOR WILLIAM SUDDUTH (UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES) asked about the plan as the campus starts to spread out, and if there is going to be some consideration in the plan of movement during the day? He would really like it if he just brought his car to work and did not have to get back in it to go anywhere until he went home, but if he has to go over to Hampton Street, or to a committee meeting down at Rice Athletics, the easiest and quickest choice is to get in that car and drive the car from one parking lot to another. Is there some way to improve the on-campus transportation system to do that?
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS stated that is one of the things that they’re working on.
It’s not so much a route system but a point-to-point system where a person walks out his door and is picked up and dropped off at Hampton as long as he has the app on his phone.
It will tell people basically what time it’s going to be showing up and they can actually know exactly when that bus is going to show and it’s going to take them directly to
Hampton and then they’ll know when the bus is coming back on the AVL, which is
Automatic Vehicle Locator System. That is in play now and they will have that information out probably within the next two months of how transportation will be changing.
PROFESSOR STEPHANIE MILLING (THEATRE AND DANCE) asked how this plan impacts or improves motorcycle and scooter parking.
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VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that last summer they increased their number of scooter parking and motorcycle parking in the core by over 120 and there will probably be another 60 over this summer being increased. That is a phenomenon now and they welcome that. The only thing is with scooters is they have to get much more control on the way they move though campus because they use sidewalks and all those things so they need to communicate with students on what’s prohibited. But there will be an increase cycle, motorcycle and scooter parking.
CHAIR GRANT asked what would happen to the “H” permits. [note: these are permits given to faculty and staff currently employed with 25 years of continuous University employee, which allows them to park in any faculty/staff lot on campus at any time of day]
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS stated that they have to make a decision on “H” permits because they do not have a clue on where they’re parking day to day and there’s no way to design a system where Huggins can be accountable to faculty and staff in providing a sure parking space every morning, if they don’t know where everybody’s parking. “H” stickers can wander anywhere. He is going to make a recommendation to the body that they do remove “H” permits. At one time there were only 50-60 of them on campus and now it’s 500 on campus and they just cannot manage them.
PROFESSOR ELIZABETH WEST (UNIVERITY LIBRARIES) stated that one of the challenges faculty and staff can find when they arrive to work in the morning is that the lot has been closed for a special event or something else and they suddenly have to divert and try to find parking elsewhere. So if there will be reserved faculty/staff lots, what kind of system is there going to be to alert us better ahead of time when something like that is going to happen?
VICE PRESIDENT HUGGINS replied that they will try to minimize the number of core area events that reserve parking and they will try to place those in the hourly parking areas of the garage. But there will be situations where they have to close a lot and it is up to Parking to make sure that they do a better job alerting employees not just hours but days maybe even weeks ahead of this event is going on and to notify what the alternate parking area is for that day.
CHAIR GRANT stated that Parking’s goal is providing a service. They’ve got a constraint under state law that they can’t take any money from the State budget to provide the parking as an auxiliary service. It has to pay for itself so working within those constraints, they are trying to balance the needs. As Huggins said, employees haven’t had to pay for those surface lots that have been there for 40 years and as result there’s been no maintenance on those lots for 40 years.
The first route for feedback is to the staff. The second route is through the Faculty
Welfare Committee. Thirdly if there’s any way that Grant can help or take ideas please let him know. At the end of the day they’re all here for the same reason and anything they can do to make faculty more productive, giving them more time to work on their
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research, more time to spend with students and less time to worry about parking, that’s where they want to get.
4. Report of Committees. a. Senate Steering Committee, Elizabeth West, Secretary:
SECRETARY ELIZABETH WEST (Libraries) announced the two candidates for the
Chair-Elect: Marco Valtorta, Computer Science and Engineering and Esmaiel Jabbari, from Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. Their CV’s and their statements will be posted to the Faculty Senate Site and will be hot linked in the next agenda. The election will be held at the next meeting on April 6 th
.
WEST presented the slate of nominees which was distributed with the agenda.
Nominations are allowed from the floor.
She thanked all of the Senators who have done such a great job in recruiting and encouraging their colleagues to volunteer for these committees. b. Committee on Curricula and Courses, Professor Kathleen Kirasic, Chair:
PROFESSOR KATHLEEN KIRASIC (PSYCHOLOGY) presented the February report which was interrupted due to a weather emergency. The Faculty Senate Committee on
Curricula and Courses brings forward for 34 proposals for February: 14 from the College of Arts and Sciences; 11 from the College of Engineering and Computing; 7 from the
College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management and 2 from the School of Music.
There was no further discussion and the proposal was approved as submitted.
PROFESSOR KIRASIC brought forward 8 proposals for March: 4 from the College of
Arts and Sciences; 2 from the College of Education; 1 from the College of Hospitality,
Retail and Sport Management and 1 from University-Owned International.
There was no further discussion and the proposal was approved as submitted. c. Committee on Instructional Development, Professor Tena Crews, Chair:
PROFESSOR TENA CREWS (HOSPITALITY, RETAIL AND SPORT
MANAGEMENT) brought forward 4 courses for approval: LATN 109, LATN 110;
RETL 365 and HPEB 502.
There was no further discussion and the proposal was approved as submitted. d . Committee on Scholastic Standards and Petitions, Professor Kathy Snediker, Chair :
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PROFESSOR KATHY SNEDIKER (UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES) reported that the committee was asked to look at the issue of faculty approval for auditing courses. Since the switch to Self-Service Carolina, students no longer have the ability to choose audit through the system so a form was created that currently only requires student signature to audit a course. The thinking was that faculty would want to be able to approve someone to audit their particular section. The committee looked at the bulletin which currently and simply says, “The applicant must complete the prescribed procedure for enrollment through the Office of the Registrar.” It doesn’t say what that procedure is, so the committee unanimously approved a motion to require that all audit requests are approved by the instructor and to ask the Registrar’s Office to add a faculty signature line to the approval form which they have agreed to do. Faculty will now be able to approve any audit request for their courses. There were no questions.
5. Reports of Officers.
PRESIDENT HARRIS PASTIDES began his report with comments on the CNN town halls held for the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates, that were held in the
Law School auditorium. Many law students participated in the events. Pastides has been talking to Carolina students about voting; only about 40% of American college students will vote in November, which is about the same as other categories of age in the United
States of America.
The President also held a leadership dialogue with Mark Emmert, the President of the
NCAA in the Music Hall of the Darla Moore School of Business, which was a very exciting opportunity for many students and others and press to hear about the tumultuous reality relative to money and health, safety, well-being, professionalism in college athletics today.
Last week had an announcement that University of South Carolina will lead a consortium on cyber security, one of the most important issues of the day. There is not enough money in the treasury, this university or anywhere to be totally secure so the question is
“How to prioritize based on risk those things that are most important in a university - student records, health records, and other proprietary personnel information?”
Universities get hacked every single day, hundreds of times every single day.
About 50% of students will open spam and phishing emails. South Carolina, of course, having not been known as a paragon of cyber security with the Department of Revenue hacking experience, is now trying or aiming to be among the better places. This is a consortium on IT education and on R&D. All colleges and universities in the state will work with business and with government to see if South Carolina could become known as a state where it’s good to be located if a person is concerned about cyber security.
On February 24 th , the University had a good, positive, inclusion forum. It was held in the
Campus Room of the Capstone building. It was a follow-up to the Vision 20/20, a protest that held last October. It was about 2 hours and was well attended. Not one thing happened during the forum that was in any way untoward or unwelcomed. It was
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attended by a lot of students representing Women’s Groups, LBGTQQ, ethnic minorities and majority students as well, all of whom came to ask that their concerns be continued to be worked on mainly by our Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Issues that came up were signage on campus, gender neutral housing, gender neutral bathrooms, being able to be chose a preferred name to be called by. Increased counseling and health services, especially for LGBTQQ students. Daculty and staff were present, but it was mainly a student forum.
The President also represented the University in a panel last week on Women in Higher
Education talking about how to move the needle forward, what is being done at Carolina, the number of senior positions in the university that recently have recruited women. Dr.
Terry Smith chairs that particular group this year. It was a wonderful forum.
The University was sued by two students and it’s a very serious issue. Two students who were sponsored by a group in Washington called FIRE, F-I-R-E, said the University infringed on their constitutional right to freedom of speech. The administration has a different opinion about that. The particulars are not really debatable by either side.
Student groups, libertarian groups asked for the right to have a display outside of the
Russell House on Greene Street. They were granted it. Some people suggested they needed to pay for it, that’s not true. There is a $29.00 requirement for outside groups, not from within the university. That $29.00 fee was not charged to these students and they displayed offensive symbols that had been displayed on other campuses, as well as here in the past. Their claim basically was that they had a right to display them. One of those was a swastika, for example, the N word and other offensive things. Several students complained saying that they were hate symbols and asked how the University could allow it.
The University has a Federal regulatory obligation to investigate when a student or staff member suggests that there has been something perpetrating hate, and the students were called in after the fact. They met with an official from the EOP office and they left. They were not sanctioned. They were not punished. They were not prohibited from that display which is their constitutional right to do. But they claimed that having been called in for a meeting to account for their free speech amounted to a restriction of free speech and harassment. The administration disagrees with that and will have an opportunity when the press comes to call, and ultimately if there is a legal debate over this, to defend the University’s point of views.
But’s very important for the faculty to be aware of the University’s policies and practices.
Pastides did not expect everybody in the room would be agreeable with the University posture, which he understands and respects, but he wanted faculty to know that the administration reveres the protection of freedom of speech.
There was also a false statement made that Carolina has free speech zones, that only in those zones are people free to really state their beliefs. That is absolutely not true. They can do it anywhere, any place, any time. But there are places where, like in front of the
Russell House, if someone is going to give a message or display something might be
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offensive to people, where they could be protected in fact, rather than the others be protected from them. If there’s the belief, for example, that there could be an incitement to violence or fighting or anything like that. But there are no free speech zones nor is that parlance to be found anywhere in the university policy.
The FIRE Group is very good at public affairs and they’ve created videos already and they show the university signage that says “No Limits” and then they ridicule that and say that there are plenty of limits on free speech on the university.
Pastides stated he will continue to protect the rights of the Carolina community, both to have free speech but also to be able to come to school and to come to work in a civil, safe, comfortable location. That doesn’t mean that difficult dialogues or debates don’t take place, or that the debates can’t rage as much as they need to, but when any kind of student group feels that they’re being subjected to hateful things, the University will continue to be guided by the Carolinian Creed. If that needs to be debated in the court room, the University will do that.
Pastides welcomed any questions about the issue. He plans to convene a group of Law
School and Journalism School faculty who have expertise on this topic. Any faculty who are interested in that feel free to help the university or disagree with the university as is their right.
The President is going to a Legislative Reception at the new Alumni Center. The
University invites all the members of the House of Representatives, of the State Senate, and all of the constitutional officers. They will not only display the beautiful new Alumni
Center and tell them that it was built entirely with private funds, came in on time and under budget, but also tell them of course why funding for the University is as important as the infrastructure. An educated populous in the state is just as an important part of the state infrastructure for social, cultural and economic well-being as highways, and prisons, and hospitals and other things.
There’s some early favorable news from the House, Ways and Means Committee about some new money for the university. There’s also some hope for a state appropriated pay raise for faculty and staff, but again it’s way too early to know.
6. Report of the Secretary.
No Report.
7. Report of the Chair.
CHAIR GRANT congratulated the two nominees for Faculty Senate Chair.
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He reported that the Faculty Senate budget is facing a shortfall. Eight years ago there was a budget surplus of $120,000.00 a year. At that point Faculty Senate Chairs began receiving a stipend $20,000.00 a year. The surplus is now down to $10,000.00. There are two choices: get more money or cut expenses and one major expense is the web casting of these proceedings. A full technical crew is assigned to the meetings; they have done an excellent job, but it costs about $8,000.00 a year out of the Senate’s very limited budget.
Starting next month the meetings will move to a system that will use the Adobe Connect
System with web casting. Instead of having a full crew, there will be one individual who will be working the camera and another person handling the audio. Costs will be cut significantly and avoid the deficit. Grant wants to make sure that there is still a surplus when his term ends.
Grant announced that the special guest coming to the April meeting is Coach Ray Tanner
Coach Muschamp will likely be with him. He has asked them to make brief comments and then take questions.
Beginning March 14 th
the Office of Diversity is conducting a Campus Climate Survey, related to the issues the President addressed. Grant asked faculty to encourage their students to take a few minutes to complete the survey so that the committees that are dealing with diversity and the related issues will have as much information from the students as possible. This will be followed in the Fall by a survey of faculty on the same subjects. They’re trying to do a 360 degree evaluation.
Last week, on behalf of the faculty, Grant met with representatives of the Public
Employees Benefits Authority. He felt there were concerns that were not addressed at the last meeting administratively about how changes were made in the provision of health benefits, especially prescription drug benefits. He expressed the concerns that had been communicated to him and insisted that it was their responsibility to allow a longer transition time next time there was any change. There will be no change for at least 3 years and they did take the faculty concerns into account. There are 800 separate units within the state that PEBA reports to. USC faculty seems to be the only one that bothered to go to them and say here are the specific issues, let us help you fix it.
8. Unfinished Business.
Professor West returned to solicit nominations from the floor for the slate of committee nominees. There were none, and the slate was approved.
9. New Business.
There was no new business.
10. Good of the Order.
There was nothing for the good of the order.
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11. Adjournment .
A motion to adjourn was seconded and passed. The next meeting of the Faculty Senate will be Wednesday, April 6 th
at 3 pm, in the Law School Auditorium.
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